1918: Influenza Memorials
November 12, 2019
By AHNZ
Why are there no public memorials to the 1918 influenza epidemic? Except, so far as I know, for the Nurses’ Chapel in Christchurch which counted nurses in with the rest of the dead, it is very rare.¹
My answer is that we build monuments to Honour and not to Victimhood. A fallen warrior or worker (eg miner) is not a victim and we don’t envision them that way. There are plenty of memorials to such men, especially since civil engineering projects of the past created so many occasions for it and male lives are always considered disposable by society.
“At least 9,000 people died in New Zealand during the epidemic. While there are many hundreds of memorials to those who died in WW1 throughout New Zealand, only 8 memorials can be found to those who died during of influenza.”- National Library of New Zealand, FB
No, we only memorialise virtue. Or, at any rate, the post-WW1 culture did so and that’s the one charged to process what happened in the epidemic. A nurse dying in the line of duty can be envisioned accurately as virtuous and so memorialised.
Memorials are the debt dignity pays to virtue.
Today’s SJW Victimhood Culture (as opposed to Dignity Culture) has a different relationship to virtue. Rather than scanning the landscape for virtue to memorialise they are a destructive force not a generative one. They tear down monuments and people. They seek standards to ravish!
It is very hard today to celebrate new goodness because an SJW will pick holes in it. Your historical event or person wasn’t perfect. They were sexist or racist or appropriated culture, they were unkind to children or animals. They didn’t recycle, they ate the wrong kind of soy bean from the wrong kind of cow living in the wrong kind of pen!
So, we don’t. The SJW holds the territory on the present and even extends into the past by debunking and undermining memorials and monuments from days gone by. One day though it will eat its own tail in this Oppression Olympics when an SJW patron finds another SJW who is victimised by not having anything to be victimised by!
Iconoclasm and book burnings are the compliment and salute victimhood pays to virtue.
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Update: 1 Te Koura marae has such a memorial monument from the time of the epidemic and it still stands today; Ref. teara.govt.nz, Ref. Taumarunui “Heart Of The King Country”, Facebook (2013)
Image Ref. Nurses’ Memorial Chapel, Riccarton Avenue, Christchurch Hospital. est.1927; Google Street View
Image Ref. ‘Treatment’ depot; Alexander Turnbull
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